tl;dr “Conservative” gun stubbornness has jumped the shark into fetishism The degree of unjustified militarism is immature, even childish. There is overlap with and backwash into mass shooter praxis. Liberals are right that a lot of it is masculinity compensation.
I think you lay out absurdity of the debate pretty well. A few points of disagreement, or perhaps misunderstanding:
Just because current issues have not yet triggered armed conservatives to revolt does not mean that there is not some threshold past which they will use their second amendment rights. I guess that means the tweets quoted here are LARPing, but again, there's probably a line past which it won't anymore be LARPing. So I don't think the conservative interest in owning guns is necessarily insincere.
I don't think you need to theorize about liberals having a masterplan to disarm conservatives. I think liberal control of narrative/bubble/lack of feedback causes liberals to simply be wrong about a lot of things, despite sincerely held beliefs. In fact, I think its the sincerity of their beliefs (despite often being wrong) that makes them more effective advocacy wise, leading to your hypothesized conservative penis envy. The liberal echo chamber problem on this issue is amplified by their class contempt for deplorables.
Finally, I don't think I agree with the Coast model as I understand it. The idea seems to be that we're left with long tail weird events that haven't changed in absolute frequency, only in relative frequency. Our success addressing other more common causes of accidents makes these long tail incidents stand out. But with school/mass shootings, the data shows they actually have increased. Perhaps so too with the crazy flight crashes he mentioned. The common thread in both cases could be our declining mental health etc posited in this piece.
I think you lay out absurdity of the debate pretty well. A few points of disagreement, or perhaps misunderstanding:
Just because current issues have not yet triggered armed conservatives to revolt does not mean that there is not some threshold past which they will use their second amendment rights. I guess that means the tweets quoted here are LARPing, but again, there's probably a line past which it won't anymore be LARPing. So I don't think the conservative interest in owning guns is necessarily insincere.
I don't think you need to theorize about liberals having a masterplan to disarm conservatives. I think liberal control of narrative/bubble/lack of feedback causes liberals to simply be wrong about a lot of things, despite sincerely held beliefs. In fact, I think its the sincerity of their beliefs (despite often being wrong) that makes them more effective advocacy wise, leading to your hypothesized conservative penis envy. The liberal echo chamber problem on this issue is amplified by their class contempt for deplorables.
Finally, I don't think I agree with the Coast model as I understand it. The idea seems to be that we're left with long tail weird events that haven't changed in absolute frequency, only in relative frequency. Our success addressing other more common causes of accidents makes these long tail incidents stand out. But with school/mass shootings, the data shows they actually have increased. Perhaps so too with the crazy flight crashes he mentioned. The common thread in both cases could be our declining mental health etc posited in this piece.